System of telemedicine services designed for family doctors' practices

The main goal of the most European telemedicine programs is to increase acc ess to emergency and primary care; however, telemedicine presents both prof ound opportunities and challenges to general practice/family medicine. The aim of this project is to develop and demonstrate a regional primary care t eleconsulting system in Poland linking an academic family medicine center a nd 10 family doctors' practices (both urban and rural) within a range of 10 0-200 km, serving a local population of 25,000 individuals. It is designed to support real-time consultations among health care providers via a comput er network, provide secure access to multimedia patient records, and facili tate an innovative home monitoring and remote care from doctors to their pa tients. The entire process (planned for 3 years) includes: selecting the be st technology (i.e., teletransmission system, communication protocols, etc. ) and equipment; preparing the assumptions and conditions for formats and t ransmission rates; analysis of the existing techniques of compression and p reparing own specific solution; finding an optimal infrastructure (i.e., eq uipment and communication configuration); implementing the system; evaluati on of the medical economic, organizational, and sociological aspects of the system (i.e., accessibility to primary health care, cost feasibility and c ost-effectiveness of telemedicine services, quality of care assessment, etc .). The project offers the potential to improve: access to high-quality pri mary health care; the patient-physician bond and the attending physician's level of confidence; education of family doctors; use of expensive resource s; and a convenient mode of delivering medical services to the patient.